-Ship battles need more tactis. In nexus jupiter incident you can pin point specific locatins on a ship to target.
-shield effects need to be improved- a sphere around the ship and when energy weapons or missiles or ships hit shields the illuminate in that area just like in space films like andromada and star trek.
-ships need to be bigger but not necessarily slower(come on 49m/s)
these are elite ships with big, big engines they should not crawl around on their belly. These are big ships not something an m3 can fly the length of in the space of a 2 seconds probably less.
- space needs to be bigger in a lot of ways i miss i-was 2 and in freelancer you could be stoped when using jump gates.
-get rid of jump gates if need be start a new universe, gates limit the size of ships in this game.
-stations should be huge. i mean huge. When i was flying a mammoth it was bigger than the split trading dock, or it look like it
More Battles- in fact turn the battles into rome total war but with battle ships. more space more enemies who ACTUALLY have a purpose in life apart from so you can jump into their sector and pick a fight with them cause you feel like it- the Xenon come to mind here qiute quickly... i wonder why
-We want a proper universe or galaxy where you do not have to use jump gates, where you are truly free to roam. use a star trek sort of jumpdrive to explore the galaxy in fact, this is the 21st centuary make some real changes to computer games. Make people stop refering back to "the good old days of Elite" make those days today and with sutiable enhancements that show that games have actually come a long way gameplay wise
Single player game needs to be perfected in X3 first, all of these are applicable to X3 as improvements......
- X4 should definately introduce a 'multiplayer option' even if the game is designed predominantly to be single player.
- More variety in ship classes like the addition of Frigates & Battlecrusiers.
- Stations should have defence options.
- Clear goals for gameplay like domination of a proportion of the galaxy.
- Interface for controlling a large fleet (like Homeworld2).
- Ability to land on planets and moons.
- New stella objects e.g. Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Neutron Stars....Black holes, comets, meteorites, star clusters.
- Gameplay should involve more strategy and tactical elements than it currently does.
- Hyper-space/jump graphics need to be worked on, look at examples from StarWars, Babylon5 etc... as well as other space games. The gates are nice but the transition between them sucks. Perhaps if the camera goes into 3rd person view before and after going through the gate with some crossover FVM graphics for the jump.
- Jumpgates should occur less frequently in my opinion and be used only to cover large distances, ships should have the ability to jump to adjacent sectors under their own power. Likewise there should be a counter measure to prevent ships from jumping within a certain range.
Now I'm being constructive so can the replies also be the same?
The X games and X3 do a lot of things right, the ground work is laid for something quite spectacular but it is never quite realised. Each game falls far too close to the last, so I thought I should give my opinion on what's wrong and how it could be fixed. The first is the interface, which has been greatly improved but still lacks finesse, it may be fortuitus going to an outside design firm to design a truly excellent interface as this is the players only window into the game, if there are problems players get it shoved right in their faces. The original Privateer had some extremely useful Unique HUD windows, let me give you some example updated and customised to X3. I target an Argon Buster, in the Monitor (currently just showing me a nice but utterly useless cam view of the target ship), I see a plan view of the ship, with locational shield and damage status, weapon load-out, generator output and speed are plainly visible. I am provided with almost all the useful info that I need in a single window. Currently this info is located all over the place, some of it nested deep within the menu system which I'm not going to wade through while in the thick of combat. The same goes with trading, the info I require from a station is its stock. If I deep scan then sure give me all the yummy options like cargo, landed ships etc., but I don't need them slowing me down getting to the info I need all the time.
So:
- Well designed interface that groups similar tasks/info in one quick menu.
- Declutter, give me what I need, and more only when I ask.
- Unique HUD modes for specific tasks (trading, combat etc.).
The second is aimlessness, the X games have a lot of middle but it doesn't go anywhere, you can't go above your station, Once you're CEO of your big company that's as far as you can go, you never make it to self sufficiency, you're stuck in a never ending cycle of buy and build. There is no cost of doing business, no maintenance, no wages (ok, few plug-ins and add-in's have it), but most importantly no way forward. Give me a reason for building all this stuff, let me go off into distant unknown space and build my own empire!
Complexes came very close, the best would be modular station designs, where you start with a landing and cargobay and add on components that do particular things (of course you'd keep the prefabs too), which you can design and then add on at a later date.
The economy is very simplistic, stations with more than one product was a big step forward and just look at how much more realistic the economy is but this whole energy requirement remains a problem. Alongside no costs, you never really feel part of the economy, Ok so your factories produce is selling lower than you'd like, no problem, just leave it be and maybe one day prices will rise high enough for you to sell your goods. Without costs a whole section of the complexity of the game is simply bypassed, the cost of factories are still too low, so I set up one, run it into the ground and set up another, an infinitum. Soon I have an empire of 43 factories and am hero of the universe. Owning a factory should be rewarding in both the challenge it presents and the money I gain from owning it but at the moment there's no challenge, its wash and go. The notoriety stuff is great but without factions it seems a little hollow. This is a whole part of the game that needs working on.
Currently the economy is a pyramid, so lets keep with that but with a few real world ideas thrown in there:
Agriculture (The core industry, everyone needs food)
Collection (ships that go out, collects a raw material and returns to a central point)
Refining (turns that raw material into resources)
Manufacturing (turns resources into equipment and products like say farming equipment),
High-tech Manufacturing (turning products into high-tech products)
Shipbuilding (turns the whole range of products into ships!)
Support (internal hangers for repair and storage of ships, trading upgrades, entertainment modules, habitation upgrades for more workers)
So:
- Ditch the shampoo factory economy give me economic challenge!
- Shipyards that require stuff to build ships.
- Modularised factories that can be made to serve almost any purpose.
- Give us a reason for all this building! What am I doing it for? Give me an endgame!
- Give the player the ability to become self sufficient. A player shipyard.
- Connect the dots you've already laid in X3! It's all there in the code now give it!
- Economic strategy, like in that interview.
The third is uniformity the gate network is a crutch, like jump drives, the player is kept in check, held back. This is of course due to the fact that opening the universe, in a sense drawing the distance would require years of extra programing.
A procedurally generated universe is the future of space games, Egosoft might now know it yet but it is. Luck would have it that much of space is empty and you need only draw what needs to be drawn, this is shown to great advantage in all X games. It would allow highly detailed full solar systems to exist throughout our very own X universe, it throws back the boundaries. It also fills in the space in between effectively allowing players to jump into open space. Now to build such an engine is a lot of work, not only to program but also to fill, you'd require a lot of extra graphical objects especially textures.
One thing that bugs me is the loss of a lot of the uniqueness between the races, all the stations all exactly alike, I rove space thinking "This could be Argon Prime". Show us that we're in alien/other peoples space. On the plus pirates have improved, although there's not really an underground society, you can't run guns or food or almost anything to the pirates as they don't need them, and even if you could there's no one who'd stop you if the goods aren't illegal.
I used to see a lot of asking for planet landings, this could be provided via a re-entry mini-game and/or cutscene, which will satisfy most. Of course once there you run into problems, do you allow players to build on planets? How do you handle planets? which are massive economies in themselves. There are a lot of questions as to what to do once there, I hope that some answers can be found so that planets could be included.
- Procedurally generated space, the first company to do this is going to make a ton of money.
- Return to unique races (mostly factories, I'm ok with the ships and cockpit) of earlier games.
- Move towards finding a way to include the economies of planets.
[edit for spelling so shoot me already!]
Oh and while I remember remove the energy cell requirement for Jumpdrive, connect it to the generator as to how far you can go (with the promised generator upgrades this would become natural) and have it take time to recharge.
Last edited by sai-ku on Sat, 19. Nov 05, 22:36, edited 2 times in total.
I like all the ideas here, but the most important thing for me is the immersion. Currently, I see ships flying around, but very little life actually happens. There should be missions that are messaged to you while flying, and you should have the A.I. building stations and attacking races they don't like.
Also, landing on planets would be cool, but that would be a very big job for egosoft. I wouldn't mind having just a city and a bit of countryside for each planet (or maybe not countryside if the planet is different). This could be like the main spaceport for each planet.
Hopefully egosoft will take into account what is being said here, and maybe introduce some parts of it in a patch. That would be good.
Great ideas. I would like it even better if there were very large parts of space, maybe 20-25, and each of these would be the equivalent to about 40 sectors. You could jump around within them, and they would be whole solar systems. The gates would connect the larger areas, and there would be more than one gate between two areas.
I also like the idea of planetary landings. Maybe go to a designated checkpoint, have a cutscene of your ship flying into the atmosphere then have an area of planet that you can fly around on. It could be like a space port, with other ships flying around, and maybe a couple of capital ships docked. That would be really cool.
I agree that the other ships travel around, and yet do little else.
In X-tension freigters would call you up asking for defense from a Xenon attack and in some sectors you would come through a gate and get challenged to a race to the systems trading dock.
Lets have some communication from the other ships, rather than you being the only one requesting help, let other ships call for help or even stations.
As it is the first you are aware of a ship or station in trouble are the sounds of battle. Surely a request could come in from a ship or staion and your target switch to the ship in question.
I would like to see Typed discriptions of items and be able to find the description of those items w/o having to be at stations, and also i would like a trading system sort of similar to eve where i could choose the ITEM i wish to sell or buy, and a list of all the STATIONS buying/ selling that item as well as the QUANTITIES OF THOSE ITEMS cuz right now its such a bummer buying too much of one thing and then not being able to sell the rest wtf!
Domination wrote:I would like to see Typed discriptions of items and be able to find the description of those items w/o having to be at stations, and also i would like a trading system sort of similar to eve where i could choose the ITEM i wish to sell or buy, and a list of all the STATIONS buying/ selling that item as well as the QUANTITIES OF THOSE ITEMS cuz right now its such a bummer buying too much of one thing and then not being able to sell the rest wtf!
Well that could be a neat update to the best buy/selling price locator which is a bit useless right now.
Yes, X games are, I think, unique because there is no end game or closure. I suppose the end of the plot could be considered an end game but the plots have been so short that this would draw great and valid criticism. Further to that, it appears that all plot lines are of a fighting nature there has never been as far as I know a plot line for traders. So for those that prefer to trade their way to fame and fortune the current plots are, to some extent, meaningless and off the users chosen path.
It is often said that it is the journey that counts and I agree that the enjoyment is in the journey. But a journey without a destination is no longer a journey and is surely a different matter.
It seems that end games wouldn't be hard to define and and option could be chosen by users at the start of the game rather like many RTS games. For example, it could be made that one of the bad guys would cease to spawn and eliminating them all from the Universe brings an end to that game. For a trader it could be eliminating one of the competitive nations etc. Such an approach could still allow the current game to exist as an option. I think that the inclusion of several end game options would give players a reason to restart from scratch with a different end game option and enhance the replay value of the game considerably.
It would be nice to get some sort of reward for a players achievement after playing a game for several hundred hours. It would be interesting to hear from X2 players as to why they stopped playing I am sure that in many cases it would be sheer boredom brought on by a case of "There is nothing of interest left to do".
well there are some great ideas here. all of which I think hit in the same general direction.
as general ideas I think they need to look ot other games like: homeworld, other space sims, mechwarrior, Stratagy games and take the ideas and interfaces from there.
the thing that X i think needs to look at is the fact that governments will sell you capital ships. they don't do that now so why are they willing to do it in the future?
you should have to design and make your own capital ships. You Should have to employ scientists to research new technology and create the factories to make what you need.
and then if you get too big governments should become hostile to you.
I've never really been into the trading thing as I didn't see a point other than getting money to buy nore stuff. It might be an idea that you are the leader of a fraction (or something) and you have to establish an empire and explore (this though may be taking the game in a different direction)
Landing on planets is a fine idea but I don't think it would add anything to the game. also I think that some ships would not be able to land on planets (for obvious reasons). what I would suggest is:
space elevators (read red, green and blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson i think). simply put it's an astaroid is put into orbit and a cable ties it to the planet, with things going up and down the cable.
anyway this is all rather random and ill thought out.
sorry for the spelling mistakes (i am sure there are some)
I havn't read barely any posts in the thread but the one on the top of this page gave me thoughts on what I would like to see.
A true Empire building game, where you find an empty system and found your own Empire.
At first you start as a trader much like now and you have to make enough money to afford your own Player HQ and that acts as your Empire base for R&D where you design your own ships and your own economy. You have to design factories and decide what they will buy and sell based on the products other races make and your own unique goods that other races might be interested in as well.
you slowly grow in size by trading with other races until they start to show some concern as to how powerfull you are becoming and then maybe some hostility begins to break out in remote systems and things start to become worse & worse etc.
This game will need diplomacy too to keep everyone happy with each other via trade agreements and non-agression pacts etc.
That's a basic outline but I think it's a good start for Egosoft to expand on
I really wish for X4 to have a very different universe.
In X2/3 (haven't played previous X games), sectors are limited to have only 4 jumpgates.
It might be possible to have a universe like Freelancer's, where a sector can have as much jumpgates as needed.
There was a mod for Freelancer that holds the Borg Collective and that sector had about 10-12 jumpgates to other sectors.
Also, natural wormholes (also like in Freelancer) are very welcome.
But they should be located far from the center of the sectormap, so the player has another reason to explore space.
They could be shortcuts between sectors (connecting Three Worlds to Ore Belt for example) and pirates would use them often, making it more risky for the player to use them (use a shortcut, but at a price).
That's it for now.
GamePC: 64bit Quad-core i5-3450 @ 3.1GHz, 12GB RAM, nVidia GeForce RTX2070 8GB, 22" LG Full-HD LED-monitor, Windows 7 Home 64bit
HellToupee wrote:but that wouldnt work for x as it tracks all ships, its not like elite where you are the only ship and it can generate things at random.
No.
How far you choose to specify is up to you, there is nothing that dictates that things have to be completely random, P.G. just offers a frame-work to make large dynamic spaces a reality without requiring a super computer. It's like an engine that abides by rule-sets. You say Two Suns, Five planets, Specific Moons, 3 dense asteroid belts and the engine constructs all these things around the rules you've instructed it without you having to design those things.
P.G. would offer Egosoft the chance to design whole systems using rule-sets. Stations and Ships could be tracked as they are now but within the new universe space.
IMHO, the ultimate space sim game should be like this:
- no X universe, it's become too well-known and boring. maybe it should be left up to some extent, but it needs a new direction. something like... argons found earth, went back to it and then continued in the other direction. the Y universe. the main enemy there are xenon again and, of course, pirates. nobody needs khaak...
- random generated content (sectors, galaxies) like diablo dungeons. it will be complicated, but this improves replayability and the sense of actually exploring places where noone has been before. there should be static content, of course - the initial sectors (knows space), but after unknown sectors start appearing, it should be random from then on. and there should be some kind of better way of exploring, not just flying through gates.
- technology research, different bases. something like haegemonia + x. missions in bases. more missions!
- more diplomacy options, interaction between pilots, respect options (buy it). like freelancer.
- whole systems in a sector. like in haegemonia.
- a bit of battlecruiser series' immersion.
- i loved freenalcer, but there was just too little to do.
- there are probably more things i would like, but i just can't think of any others at the moment.
the ultimate space sim game will probably be never made because of the processing power the universe needs. i guess the only way it can be done is with MMO, like eve. haven't played it because of the cost, but i guess i would like it. i have x3, but i'm still waiting for my ram upgrade to arrive. until then, it's unplayable.
A Goner Propoganda Licence. You make a donation at the Goner temple and get an (L) by your Goner reputation. This adds an extra option to all your comm menus - "Have you heard the good news?"
Every time you use this option when comm-ing non-Goners it increases your reputation with the Goner - but drops your rep with the race of the being you comm-ed, unless he becomes a convert at which point he will say "Yes! Thank-you! Now I understand!" If that happens you get a big Goner rep boost, and a small rep boost with the race of the comm-ed person.
